any person is therein, is capital. Also, the wilful setting fire to any church, chapel, warehouse, mill, barn, agricultural produce, ship, coal-mine, and the like. In Scotland it is called wilful fire-raising, and in both England and Scotland it is a considerable aggravation of the crime if the burning is to defraud insurers.
Art, in its most extended sense, as distinguished from nature on the one hand and from science on the other, has been defined as every regulated operation or dexterity by which organized beings pursue ends which they know beforehand, together with the rules and the result of every such operation or dexterity. Science consists in knowing, art in doing. In this wide sense it embraces what are usually called the useful arts. In a narrower and purely æsthetic sense it designates what are more specifically termed the fine arts, as architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry. The useful arts have their origin in positive practical needs, and restrict themselves to satisfying them. The fine arts minister to the sentiment of taste through the medium of the beautiful in form, colour, rhythm, or harmony. See Fine Arts, Painting, Sculpture, &c.—In the Middle Ages it was common to give certain branches of study the name of arts.—Cf. A. C. R. Carter, History of Art, The Year's Art.
Art Collections. See Collections, Artistic.
Art, Teaching of. With the advent of the present industrial age the teaching of art has undergone a profound change. The fine and the industrial arts have been equally affected. In mediæval times, and in the earlier classic ages, the system of apprenticeship prevailed, and all teaching of the arts and of the artistic crafts was given by masters of the various arts or trades to the apprentices who worked under their guidance as assistants. Standards of excellence were maintained by trade guilds, who enforced rules as to workmanship as well as rules for the economic conditions of each trade or craft. The painter of pictures, or of mural decorations, was trained in the same way as any other craftsman, working as an apprentice under a master.
When, in the last century, machinery driven by steam-power took the place of hand labour in industry, the small independent workshops gradually disappeared, as the industrial centres increased in those localities where coal or raw material was most easily obtained; and, as the processes of each trade or craft became more and more subdivided and specialized, the old system of apprenticeship, which had become unnecessary, broke down. The teaching and tradition of the small independent craft workshops had no counterpart in the new centralized industrial systems. Even the painters of pictures needed no longer to prepare their own materials, for special industries arose, and mechanical processes were developed, for the work which formerly had been done in the artists' workshops by apprentices. The fine arts in this way suffered the loss of their old systems of teaching and instruction.
To meet the need for a revival of art teaching in the crafts and other industries, there arose a movement towards the centralization of teaching in schools of art during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Following the impulse given to that movement by the great exhibition in 1850, the British Government founded the schools of science and art in London and in most of the important provincial towns. Earlier in the century bodies of artists had founded national academies for the teaching of art; and the teaching of drawing was gradually adopted as a part of ordinary school education. Step by step training in schools of art or technical schools took the place of the teaching formerly given during apprenticeship in every craft workshop. The ancient guilds were replaced by the new trades unions, but these took no part in the maintenance of artistic standards nor of quality in workmanship.
At the present time the teaching of art begins with the early school lessons in drawing, and is carried on in special technical classes or schools of art, where teachers of the 'fine arts' and of the artistic crafts give instruction to students preparing for professional work. In a few of the artistic trades the system of apprenticeship still survives, but the teaching given by that means is usually supplemented by attendance at a school of art or technical school. Under the Education Act of 1918 attendance at technical classes in the daytime became compulsory for apprentices in all industrial trades.
The subject of art teaching was formerly disregarded by the universities, but has become definitely within their province since the founding of the Slade professorships at Oxford, Cambridge, and London Universities, and of the professorship of fine art at the University of Edinburgh.
The chief schools of art in Great Britain are the schools of the Royal Academy in London, the Slade School at University College, London, and the Royal College of Art at South Kensington, also the Central School of Arts and Crafts, and the other large metropolitan schools of the London County Council.
In most of the English provincial towns are municipal or other schools of art under the control of the Board of Education.